Full Interview of Megan Fox from the June issue of Allure

Megan Fox may be only 24, but in celebrity years she’s practically geriatric. At an age when many actresses are still asking if you want ketchup with your fries, she has appeared in an array of movies and TV sitcoms; stripped to her skivvies for men’s magazines and served up provocative sound bits; been anointed the next Angelina Jolie thanks to her dark hair, pillowy lips, tattoos, and general aura of danger; and had a few public feuds.

But Fox is now keeping her audience off balance, executing what seems to be a dignified retreat. She’s choosing small, independent movie projects, starring in sexy but sophisticated ads for Armani Jeans and Emporio Armani underwear, and modulating her outrageous remarks…somewhat. Is it because she’s overwhelmed by all the attention she’s attracted? Is she making a calculated career move under the guidance of concerned advisors? Or could it be that the actress, who left Port St. Lucie, Florida, for Hollywood when she was 17, is just a complicated, contradictory person, still figuring out what she wants out of adulthood?
When she’s speaking, Fox–standard off-duty uniform of black leggings and baggy gray T-shirt not quite managing to mute her inherent look-at-me quality–is, more than anything else, surprising.

All those racy interviews? Part of the job.
In the past, Fox teased the press with stories such as the possibly fictional (or embellished) tale about an affair with a Russian stripper named Nikita. This perhaps earned her more scrutiny for her imagined sex life than for her onscreen performances. “I was really open when I first started,” she says now. “Trying to be lighthearted and have a sense of humor and engage in some sort of satire sometimes. It did backfire to a certain extent, and it became too exhausting. I still have the same sense of humor, but I have no desire to express it, really, anymore, because I’ve always been fucked for doing so.”
While she’s certainly comfortable with her sexuality, often posing and acting in revealing clothes and not shying away from love scenes like the one with Amanda Seyfried inJennifer’s Body, she maintains a strong sense of privacy. Today, for example, she learns about a blurry picture of herself topless, taken on a cell phone, that was leaked while she was filming a new independent movie, Passion Play, in which she plays a circus-sideshow performer who has bird wings. “If I knew who took this picture, I would personally cause them harm–physical harm,” she says. “I’m not a fucking reality-TV star that’s courting the paparazzi and wants my fucking picture taken all the time. I’m at my job and I’m trying to play a character and I’m trying to be serious, and this is the shit that’s happened to me. It makes me furious.”

She’s not a diva. Really.
Fox says the episode in which three Transformer crew members posted a public letter declaring her “ungrateful” was her personal low point of the past year. “I’ve said hundreds of times that I don’t feel deserving of the success that I have, that I don’t feel like I should be where I am, that there are a million people that would be better at what I’m doing,” she says.
Allure found her similarly humble two years ago during a fashion shoot–even though she was at the height of her shock phase then. This time, the shoot has the air of a happy reunion, and it wraps, to applause from the crew, hours ahead of schedule. “I try to be efficient whenever I’m at work, any kind of work; I don’t like wasting people’s time and wasting my own time,” she says. (“Love! Her!” creative director Paul Cavaco mouths.) But Fox is far from vain or preening: We’re sitting in front of a long mirror, and she doesn’t even glance at it once. “I hate looking at myself,” she says.

She’s actually kind of a nerd.
Fox will appear this month with Josh Brolin and John Malkovich in Jonah Hex, based on the comic book; it’s a genre for which she has a particular affection. “I liked [reading comic books] when I was a kid because it was an escape,” she says. “It was this realm that was nothing like my life, or anyone’s life that I knew. It was exciting and dangerous, and the artwork was always amazing. They’re full of adrenaline, and it was just a total escape from school, from family, from everything.” Her favorite form of escape these days is similarily innocent: “couple-y domestic stuff” with her boyfriend, actor Brian Austin Green. “We watch a lot of Discovery Channel and TLC,” she says.

She’s a bit OCD
Fox has an intense fear of germs. She’s extremely wary of restaurant silverware. “Putting my mouth where a million other mouths have been, just knowing all the bacteria that you carry in your mouth? Uccch,” she says, with a shudder. Public restrooms are to avoided whenever possible, especially when the toilets don’t have lid: “I’m never doing that again. Every time someone uses a bathroom and they flush, all the bacteria is shot into the air.” Recently, watching MythBusters on Discovery, she saw, to her horror, a sneeze captured by a slow-motion camera. “You have no idea how far it sprays,” she says. “That changed me.”
Fox says she tends toward obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I was in therapy when I was younger, but my therapists were idiots, so I swore off therapy for a long time.”Last winter, though she sought out a psychiatrist after starting to wash her hands so often that her knuckles bled. “I said, ‘This is a sickness, I have an illness, this has moved beyond “Oh I need my hands to be clean”–this is not OK anymore,'” she says.
Though she now has the handwashing (mostly) under control, Fox still fights obsessive thinking. “People can’t imagine what the struggle is really like, when you can’t let go of a thought or a word,” she says, politely declining to get specific. “All day and everyday. And I can engage in a conversation with someone and seem like I’m present, and the whole time I’m in my own head thinking about something else, worrying about something else.”

She curses like a sailor.
The tally of F-bombs during this interview: 24. Number published: 6.

She was a loner as a kid
Her parents divorced when she was three, her one sister is 12 years older, and their stepfather was strict. “I was only around other kids while I was at school,” Fox says. “I wasn’t allowed to have friends over, really. That has a lot to do with why I need so much space and why I ned so much alone time.”

She still is.
“I could go days, weeks without talking to another human being,” she continues. “I could probably go months and be perfectly satisfied. Easily. It’s the opposite of being needy, but at the same time, I don’t know if I would want to be in a relationship with someone who required as much alone time as I require.” But Fox is actually more successful at relationships than most people in Hollywood; she has been dating Green for over five years and is de facto stepmother to Kassius, his 8-year-old son with actress Vanessa Marcil, who shares custody. They recently moved into a Spanish-Mediterranean house with a pool in a verdant neighborhood in Los Angeles. “I have to hire a decorator,” she says, adding with a note of sarcasm, “do feng shui.”

She’s maternal.
Fox may seem an unlikely mother figure, but she and Green recently taped a video for Funny or Die protesting budget cuts in California’s public schools; Green mentions his son as the motivation. And she says, “The only person I enjoy cooking for is my boyfriend’s son. I like arranging it on his little plate… I like cooking for kids, for some reason.” She has a fiercely protective streak. She recalls being besieged by paparazzi while taking Kassius to see Avatar at a movie theater. “[He] started screaming at them to ‘leave Megan alone,’ and that broke my heart,” she says bitterly. “I was so proud of him that he was brave enough to talk to adults that way, that he saw they were bothering me, but it was also so sad. Are you going to go home and feel good about yourselves that you upset a 7-year-old tonight who was seeing Avatar for the first time? Congratu-fucking-lations.”

She checks out.
She knows that sometimes she comes off strange. “I hate talking in front of large crowds of people,” she says. “You have to be yourself, there’s nothing you can hide behind, and I don’t like sharing myself. So I go to these places where I shut odd, and I don’t know what I do. Sometimes I’m normal, and sometimes I’m fucking weird and bizarre.” This disassociation from her surroundings is sometimes misinterpreted as haughtiness. During her first appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Fox blew past actor Seth Rogen, who’d hoped for a kiss on the cheek–a trauma he relived to comic effect on a subsequent visit. “She physically stopped me from doing it,” he good-naturedly complained. Fox says, “That was accidental! All I wanted to do was get to my chair and sit down and hide if I could.”
Then there was the Rose Boy incident, during which photographers captured Fox, who was surrounded by security and fighting her way into Claridge’s hotel in London, purportedly ignoring the floral offering of a teenager. “It looked like I was shunning him, but I never saw him,” she says. “If I see kids, up to 18 years old, I’m the first person that wants to pay attention to them. I was horrified by that.”

She’s self-aware.
“You either have this fire and personality that you fight to keep, but then you have to deal with the misconceptions that go along with that, and people misquoting you and turning you into a cartoon character–or you kind of shut down and become completely politically correct,” she says. “And I don’t want to be that either, necessarily; I don’t want to have to watch my words so carefully and be so vanilla. Fuck! Let’s say I’m lucky enough to still be doing this in 20 years. I’m going to spend 20 years never saying anything interesting? Never telling a joke? Never pushing anyone’s buttons? I feel like I’m too inquisitive, and I’m just–I’m a living, breathing human. I’m a person; I’m not a robot.”

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